The Atlas is a way to efficiently represent OpenStreetMap data in memory. A subset of the data is in a "navigable network" form, meaning anything that is assumed to be navigable will be in a form of Nodes and Edges in a way a routing algorithm could traverse it. It also provides easy to use APIs to access geographical data. On top of it all, it is easy to shard and re-stitch, making it perfect for distributed processing!

Projects using Atlas:

• atlas-generator: A Spark job to distribute Atlas shards generation
• atlas-checks: A suite of tools to check OSM data integrity using Atlas, and Spark.
• josm-atlas: A JOSM plugin to visualize Atlas data.

To contribute to the project, please see the contributing guidelines.

• Edges and Nodes for navigable items (Roads, Ferries)
  • Edges provide their start Node and end Node
  • Nodes provide their incoming Edges and outgoing Edges.
  • Edges are uni-directional: a two-way road in OSM is represented as two reverse direction Edges.
• Area, Line and Point for non-navigable features (Parks, Power Lines, POIs)
• Relations (mirroring OSM Relations) linking features together
  • All features can return the Relations they belong to
• Full tag map coming from OSM on each feature
• Full geometry for every feature except Relations.
• All the entities are spatially indexed using R-Tree and Quad-Tree implementations from JTS
• ComplexEntity(ies): Entities built on the fly from an Atlas. For concepts that are higher level than a simple feature. Example: ComplexBuilding with multipolygon and parts, or ComplexTurnRestriction.
• Stitching: Combine multiple Atlas into one MultiAtlas
• Soft cut: create a new Atlas from an origin Atlas based on a polygon or a predicate.

• Grab one or more Atlas files (from here or after building them yourself), and open them with AtlasResourceLoader:

final File atlasFile = new File("/path/to/source.atlas");
final Atlas atlas = new AtlasResourceLoader().load(atlasFile);

Query the data. Examples:

• Get all edges within boundaries:

Rectangle rectangle = ...;
atlas.edgesIntersecting(rectangle).forEach(edge -> ...);

• Find all the parks with less than 6 shape points:

Predicate<Area> filter = area -> {
    return Validators.isOfType(area, LeisureTag.class, LeisureTag.PARK)
        && area.asPolygon().size() < 6;
}
atlas.areas(filter).forEach(area -> ...);

or

Predicate<Area> filter = area -> {
    return "park".equals(area.getTags().get("leisure"))
        && area.asPolygon().size() < 6;
}
atlas.areas(filter).forEach(area -> ...);

• Find all buildings with a hole:

ComplexBuildingFinder finder = new ComplexBuildingFinder();
Iterables.stream(finder.find(atlas))
    .filter(complexBuilding -> !complexBuilding.getOutline().inners().isEmpty())
    .forEach(complexBuilding -> ...);

• How many Edges are connected to a Node:

long identifier = 123;
int numberOfConnectedEdges = atlas.nodeForIdentifier(identifier).connectedEdges().size();

or

long identifier = 123;
int numberOfConnectedEdges = atlas.nodeForIdentifier(identifier).absoluteValence();

final File pbfFile;
final OsmPbfLoader loader = new OsmPbfLoader(pbfFile, MultiPolygon.MAXIMUM,
    AtlasLoadingOption.withNoFilter());
final Atlas atlas = loader.read();

Usually OSM boundaries and coastlines do not work well with JTS and country-slicing with themselves. The default osmPbfWayFilter in the AtlasLoadingOption will filter those out:

final File pbfFile;
final OsmPbfLoader loader = new OsmPbfLoader(pbfFile, MultiPolygon.MAXIMUM,
    AtlasLoadingOption.createOptionWithAllEnabled());
final Atlas atlas = loader.read();

When specifying a shard for building an Atlas from an .osm.pbf file, the generator will do a soft cut along the borders of the shard:

final File pbfFile;
final Rectangle shard;
final OsmPbfLoader loader = new OsmPbfLoader(pbfFile, MultiPolygon.forPolygon(shard),
    AtlasLoadingOption.createOptionWithAllEnabled());
final Atlas atlas = loader.read();

OSM ways usually span multiple intersections in the case of roads. To make the road network a navigable network, the process of loading an .osm.pbf file runs "way sectioning". It will follow a set of rules to break ways at intersections, and create Atlas Edges. For that, it pads the OSM feature identifiers with six digits starting from 1 to the number of sections. For example, way 123 would become Edges 123000001, 123000002 and 123000003 if it has to be broken twice.

In case of building an Atlas that is hard-cut along a polygon (usually a country boundary with boundary=administrative and admin_level=2), the process of loading an .osm.pbf file runs "country slicing". All the features that span outside of the boundary will be cut at the boundary and excluded. All the features that are inside will be assigned a country code tag if a country code is given with the AtlasLoadingOption.

The AtlasLoadingOption contains all the country boundaries, along with the country codes in a CountryBoundaryMap.

All feature identifiers will be padded and the first 3 digits of the 6 digit padding (described above) will be a country counter. If a Line 123 spans 2 countries, gets out and comes back for example, it will ship with 123001000 and 123001002 within the first country, and 123002001 in the country where it spans out (in a separate Atlas).

Way-sectioning logic, edge definition and which pbf entities (Way, Node, Relation) are brought into an Atlas are all configurable. The default configurations can be found in the main resources directory as json files (see atlas-way-section.json for an example of the way section configuration). These configurations are initialized and can be set in AtlasLoadingOption.

The PackedAtlasBuilder is here for that. It ensures that all the data that makes its way to an Atlas is consistent (for example making sure that if an Edge says its start Node is 123, then Node 123 really exists) and that an Atlas is final and cannot be modified once it has been accessed once.

• First add all the Nodes
• Then add all the Edges, Areas, Lines and Points in any order.
• Finally add all the Relations from the lowest order (no other Relation is within its members) to the higher order (other Relations are within its members). The PackedAtlasBuilder will throw an exception if a Relation is added and any of the listed members have not already been added.

The Atlas API offers a save(WritableResource) method, that is implemented by PackedAtlas. Trying to save a MultiAtlas will result in an exception suggesting to copy the Atlas to a PackedAtlas first.

From any Atlas, a PackedAtlas can be created and saved to a WritableResource (A File for example). This is done with the PackedAtlasCloner:

final Atlas atlas1;
final Atlas atlas2;
new PackedAtlasCloner().cloneFrom(new MultiAtlas(atlas1, atlas2)).save(new File("/path/to/file.atlas"));

This is the base Atlas. It is immutable, and stores all its items in large arrays in memory.

All information is kept in large arrays in memory. Each array contains data for a specific type, with each index in the array always representing the same feature. For example, there is an array that contains the Edge start nodes indices, another one that contains the Edge end node indices. In each of those two arrays, the item at index 3 is always in reference to the same Edge with OSM identifier 123. Here are all the most important arrays in the PackedAtlas:

• dictionary
• edgeIdentifiers
• nodeIdentifiers
• areaIdentifiers
• lineIdentifiers
• pointIdentifiers
• relationIdentifiers
• edgeIdentifierToEdgeArrayIndex
• nodeIdentifierToNodeArrayIndex
• areaIdentifierToAreaArrayIndex
• lineIdentifierToLineArrayIndex
• pointIdentifierToPointArrayIndex
• relationIdentifierToRelationArrayIndex
• nodeLocations
• nodeInEdgesIndices
• nodeOutEdgesIndices
• nodeTags
• nodeIndexToRelationIndices
• edgeStartNodeIndex
• edgeEndNodeIndex
• edgePolyLines
• edgeTags
• edgeIndexToRelationIndices
• areaPolygons
• areaTags
• areaIndexToRelationIndices
• linePolyLines
• lineTags
• lineIndexToRelationIndices
• pointLocations
• pointTags
• pointIndexToRelationIndices
• relationMemberIndices
• relationMemberTypes
• relationMemberRoles
• relationTags
• relationIndexToRelationIndices
• relationOsmIdentifierToRelationIdentifiers
• relationOsmIdentifiers

All Atlas features are following the flyweight design pattern. What that means is every PackedEdge, PackedNode, PackedArea, PackedLine, PackedPoint or PackedRelation contains only two things: a reference to the Atlas object it belongs to, and the index it is positioned at in all the arrays in that Atlas. This makes the feature objects really lightweight and fast to create.

When a user asks for the incoming edges to a PackedNode, then the PackedNode relays the query to its own PackedAtlas along with its index, and the PackedAtlas returns the result which is relayed to the user by the PackedNode object.

A PackedAtlas can be serialized to a WritableResource using the PackedAtlasSerializer. During that process, all the arrays are pushed to a non-compressed zip stream in which each array is a zip entry with the same name. Each array is serialized in its zip entry using standard Java serialization.

In case the Resource is a file, then the user has random access to each zip entry. That means that all the arrays are lazily de-serialized only when needed. This is extremely useful when opening an Atlas file just to check Node connectivity for example. Only the arrays relative with Nodes and Edges will be loaded.

This is a stitched Atlas. It is made of multiple sub-Atlas (which themselves can be PackedAtlas or MultiAtlas) and takes care of conflating and stitching at the intersection points.

When creating a MultiAtlas from multiple other Atlas objects, no data is copied. The MultiAtlas builds array references to remember for example where each available Edge is relative to the sub Atlas, but does not copy the Edge data. When an Edge is requested, it creates a MultiEdge that contains only its identifier and the MultiAtlas it belongs to. When a user asks for the Nodes connected to that Edge for example, the MultiEdge relays the query to its MultiAtlas that relays the query to the appropriate sub-Atlas which returns the result to be relayed back to the user.

Way sectioning assumes knowledge of the surrounding geometries to be able to know where to make a cut. In some cases, for a specific way, a shard will have knowledge of an intersection at a point we can call P1. Another shard that contains the same way has knowledge of an intersection at another point P2. But both shards do not have knowledge of the other shard's intersection point. The first shard would then have a split way at P1, and the other shard the same way split at P2. To prevent from showing discrepancies, the MultiAtlas identifies those issues and would present a way that is split at P1 and P2, with the related fixes to Edge identifiers, and Node connectivity.

For more information, please contact our community projects lead Andrew Wiseman.